> >No, I don't think anyone is interested in being judged in comparison to > linuxcnc (or Mach for that matter) > >You can diff the repos and look at the documentation for specific > features / differences. > > It is not about 'being judged'. It is about 'what advantages would MachineKit provide me over LinuxCNC?'. I am struggling with this also.
I am happily running LinuxCNC on my mill and lathe, and now I am contemplating a 3D printer. Not because I would like to have a functional 3D printer asap, but because I like to construct and tinker. See it more as a motorcyclists way of thinking: 'the destination is the excuse'. Here is a screenshot of the thing under construction: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2762301/3dprinter/frame5.png I have been succesfull at running LinuxCNC on a Raspberry Pi using a cheap ($2,51) USB-connected STM32 board on that thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WsugS7hTLk Works well enough, even considering the fact that USB is just not optimal for this purpose (I did that STM32/USB thing to be able to do a LinuxCNC workshop on laptops). So I more or less decided to base the controller on a Pi with the 7" touchscreen and use SPI-controlled L6470 dSpin drives for the motors. Waiting for those to arrive from China; will take a few weeks. I know how to do this using LinuxCNC. Write a few HAL components to drive the hardware, remap some G-codes, etc. However, what I don't know is whether Machinekit would be a better platform for this and why. When I look at the documentation I mostly see things that are familiar from LinuxCNC. The developer manual talks about NML, I'm seeing the familiar Axis/Touchy/Mini/etc. GUI's and no Machineface/Cetus, etc. Hard to figure out what the strong and weak points of MK are compared to LCNC. Questions, for example: - How similar to LinuxCNC is it to write components in C? - Does MK use the actual servo cycle time instead of assuming it is 1ms for a 1kHz servo thread? It is not really important that the time between invocations of the component functions is 800us at time t and 1200us at time t+1. Computers can calculate, so when moving in a straight line at 100mm/s position has advanced 0,08mm for time t and 0,12mm for time t+1. Same goes for integrators in a PI controller, etc. However, the LinuxCNC assumption that 1ms has passed (and just passing a period of 1e6 nsec to the components) is not optimal, especially on a system with a fairly high jitter such as a Pi and a motion platform capable of high accelerations. - Does the trajectory planner still switch back to 'slow' when using more than only XYZ axes, forcing the use of velocity-based extrusion as a workaround? I guess I have to try out MK to find the answers. -- website: http://www.machinekit.io blog: http://blog.machinekit.io github: https://github.com/machinekit --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Machinekit" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/machinekit. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
